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Thursday, September 13, 2012

BE MORE THAN A WRITER_GHOST OF ROGER ZELAZNY

Be sure and enter Roland's TRICK OR TREAT GHOST OF A CHANCE CONTEST, will you?

Lovecraft has been whispering something about visiting you in your dreams.

Ah, we ghosts do care for Roland. But more of that later.

Did not Leonora Roy do a marvelous image for him?

The ghost of Hemingway is presently keeping him company on one of Roland's blood runs.

Hemingway is reminded of his own days driving an ambulance in WWI when he accompanies Roland.

So it is left up to me to talk to you mortal writers.

Most of you are scoffing that the ghost of Roger Zelazny is currently typing his thoughts to you. Impossible you say.

You, and the rest of mankind, are quite sure what is possible and what is impossible.

In the daylight.

When the night descends, the stride of your thoughts is not quite so confident.

Not so Roland.

He is much like an animal. I do not mean that as an insult.

He takes what comes at face value, not forcing it to fit into any preconceived notions Man teaches as Science.

He deals with what comes without protesting that it cannot be, only seeing what is and adapting.

Perhaps that is why we ghosts are drawn to him. In him is that quality that Stubbs expressed in MOBY DICK :

“I know not what all may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

Not that he is overly optimistic about the world around him. For being part Lakota Sioux, he still reads the Bible by his bedside. He often quotes :

“They sleep not, except that they have done mischief;And their sleep is taken away unless they causeSome to fall.

For they eat the bread of wickednessAnd drink the wine of violence.”

That is Proverbs 4:16-17 for those of you interested in such things.In life I was not.

I thought the love of God was like the light burning from the stars :

cold and distant.

Now, that I am a ghost …

but no.

There are some secrets the dead may not share with the living.

But the secrets on how to write well … they I can share with you.

Oh, you are wondering who I am.

Don’t be embarrassed. In life I wondered the same thing.

As I wrote earlier: I am Roger Zelazny.

I made somewhat of a splash in Science Fiction in the sixties, endured and evolved in the seventies and eighties. I went the way of all flesh mid-way through the nineties in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

And Roland mourned me as a distant older brother gone over the crest of the hill before him, leaving him cold and alone.

Oh, and I inspired him to take up the pen and follow my steps into weaving tales in the genre I call Science Fantasy.

That I sparked the idea in him to be a writer drew me to him.

It was his gentle, quiet, amused nature that has made me stay. He looks on all the awkwardness of life with a sly smile that says, “You expected water to run uphill?”

But now I have an important question for you reading:

What makes one tale live, vibrant and riveting, and another merely flat, lifeless words on paper?

Not that any of us have a sure idea, although Hemingway would glare at me for writing that. But we had a close enough glimpse of the answer to make a living at what we loved to do:

Write.

What is the answer?

A joyous cry: “Come see what I found!”

If you can bring anew the childlike sense of wonder and awe to your readers that the poisons of living have drained from them, you will have a loyal following that will not quit.

What words will do that?

Certainly not the same sing-song repeat and rinse of someone else’s bestseller.The words must tilt the reader’s expectations on its ear. Did you notice I said reader?

Not readers.

You are talking to only one at the campfire of their imagination and curiosity. If you think of your audience as readers, you will talk AT them not TO them.

The author/reader relationship is intimate : friend to friend. “Look at this, man!”

One friend sharing with another something fantastic and wondrous :

The meaning of life in the skating sparks of the sun along the uneven facets of a piece of rock candy …

or striking fire down the razored spirals of a unicorn’s tusk.

If you are drawn to write, you do not need to be told the basics. You already have absorbed them from the masters :

Stirring plots, memorable characters, and absorbing ideas.

You must tap the humanity of the situations, of the people struggling against the tide of events.

Remember this is the Microwave Culture.

Your prose must be lean and spare, yet sing with the poetry of mystery and suspense. How do you do that?

Mind your surroundings.

Nothing is ever wasted to a real writer. Circumstances suggest. Events coalesce. The story will begin to flow like a shadow along the floor of your unconscious.

Once you have seen their shapes, the stories will exist as ghosts for you until you have pinned them to the paper. Perhaps that is why there are so many ghosts of writers in the Shadowlands.

We made our living from ghosts, so reciprocity demands its due.

Sometimes you will have to post a Help Wanted Ad in your unconscious to apply for positions in the story and events that have called out to you.

Do not worry. Within the hour, your unconscious mind will have them lining up for you to consider.

Read your work aloud.

Hear the clumsy prose misstep that jars your ears? A sentence is too long? Make them two. A word unneeded? Remove it. Sand your prose as a sculptor would his carving.

Give your characters life by giving them a new take on what it means to be human, to be fully alive. Most people you pass on the streets are sleepwalking from long years of debt and unfulfilled passion.

Give them hope that there is more out there, that each corner could reveal the start of an adventure that might shorten their lives but awaken their souls.

Do that and you will become more than a writer. You will become an author.

Want to read more on how to be an author? Buy GHOST WRITERS IN THE SKY:

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LISTEN to GHOST OF A CHANCE

Can an author be drawn into his own fictional world and killed by his own characters?

HIBBS HAS FOUND HIS VOICE!

A tale of enchantment

Souls At The Crossroads

Where do you need to be?

THE DEADLIEST ENEMY IS WITHIN

What if Stephen King wrote of the life of a blood courier?

Listen to this haunting tale of horror and love

It is 1853. An undead Texas Ranger is on board a cursed ship in search of a murderer who is wearing the face of her last victim as a mask.

Listen to the LAST FAE

When the world is mad, there is little else to do but show them what true insanity is!

Can a man marry both the moon and the sun?

In the eclipse of myth, he can

What Defense is an innocent soul against the Powers of Darkness?

Let Hibbs, the cub with no clue, show you

Before Indiana Jones or Allan Quartermain

There was Sam McCord and his doomed love for Meilori Shinseen

Alice and Victor in 1834 New Orleans

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Hurricane Katrina has cast New Orleans into darkness. Predators, living and undead, close in on the helpless survivors. Can Samuel McCord and a vampire priest keep the French Quarter from being drowned in blood?

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Enter the dangerous world of a Native American Noir thriller where forbidden love clashes with the politics of crime

In Memoriam - Maukie my cyber friend

Maukie - the virtual cat 2 3

RITES OF PASSAGE link

The earliest Samuel McCord adventure: Dare to board a fantasy Titanic as it sails into the Bermuda Triangle

VICTOR'S HERE!

BOOK 1: No one talks openly of the misty figures seen walking along New Orleans' iron-laced terraces, casting no shadow. Of the shapes seen rising from sewer grates. And no one willingly visits the crypt of Marie Laveau at midnight. Into this strange world arrives the street orphan, Victor Standish, from Charon's Greyhound. Charon has to keep up with the times ... the End Times. And the teen destined to be called the "Ulysses of the French Quarter" has come just in time for Hurricane Katrina, the End of All Things ... and the deadly love of the Victorian ghoul, Alice Wentworth.

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BOOK 2: Victor's a street kid. Alice is a Victorian ghoul Their love breaks the chain of reason. Their new adventures bring the French Quarter back from the brink of nightmare.

THE RIVAL

BOOK 3: Victor & Alice are in the French Quarter of 1834. Voodoo. Demigods. Revenants. And the hilarious Menage a Trois of Death! Oh, and someone we love dies at the end.

END OF DAYS is here!

St. Marrok's. The most eerie high school in which you will ever die. Its curriculum? The End of Days. Alice Wentworth plans to get an A+.

ADRIFT IN THE TIME STREAM link

SEQUEL to RITES OF PASSAGE: Come aboard the doomed DEMETER with undead Texas Ranger, Sam McCord, and sail with her into the depths of madness in ADRIFT IN THE TIME STREAM.

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SEQUEL to FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE: The dead rise. Elder Beings strain to enter our world through Katrina devastated New Orleans. And the Angel of Death is kidnapped to clear their way. Can Sam McCord stem the tide of madness in time?

Buy_THE LAST FAE

Once there was an age undreamed where legends walked this earth … and nightmares, too. Terrible were the battles, tragic the outcome of the wars. Until finally there were only two survivors : the nightmare and one bruised legend. These are the legend’s stories, each one a different facet of the same priceless gem – a jewel that has come to believe herself worthless. So come. Listen to her. Listen to THE LAST FAE.

GHOST OF A CHANCE

What if what you wrote became real?

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When dreams are sacrificed, it is the soul that burns.

CHECK OUT THE FUN!

Explore if you dare

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Journey with the last Lakota shaman, Wolf Howl. The white govenments call him Drew August. Those who hunt him call him Death. The last day of Man has dawned. Watch as Wolf Howl turns to meet his human hunters. Shadow, the love of his life, returns to aid his hunters. Then, Mankind's death descends. Can he save Shadow before the world's time runs out?

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GHOST WRITERS IN THE SKY

LEARN TO WRITE BETTER AND LAUGH ALONG THE WAY

LAST EXIT TO BABYLON

At the dawn of the End of All Things, the Last Fae finds there is no hope ... but love.

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The trilogy concludes. Not even the eclipse of myth is forever. But love is. And eclipses return. Listen. The voice of Blake, son of Man, is calling across the night skies.

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Only in the eclipse of myth can a young man find himself with both the Moon and the Sun as his brides. Can he survive what follows?

Buy_LOVE LIKE DEATH

From the pages of THE LAST FAE springs this paranormal romance/thriller. Fallen, the last fae, discovers the name of the young teenager to whom she lost her heart : Blake Adamson.But she also discovers what happens when you believe your fears over your love : heartache and loss. And so Blake Adamson finds himself torn between two loves : one fae, the other an alien drinker of souls. Their love is deadly, but love, like death, will have its way.

THE BEAR WITH 2 SHAD0WS link

Based on the stories my Lakota mother told me as a child when I was deathly ill in a freezing Detroit basement apartment. Think a Native American LORD OF THE RINGS.

OCTORBER 3RD

Read the shadowy origin of ROSE RED

FROM THE GREAT BEYOND HOP!

You dare not miss it!!

ZOMBIE PREPAREDNESS!

LISTEN TO THE CDC

Thanks, Alex!

THE WORLDS OF ROLAND YEOMANS

Donna Hole astonishes with her insights on my linked worlds

FANTASTIC REVIEW OF THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH

Michael Di Gesu does a masterful review. I am honored by his friendship

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LIFE LESSONS taught me by GYPSY

Dedicated to GYPSY

PAPYRUS PRODUCTIONS

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HELP THE HURTING

100% of the profits for ALL my books this FEBRUARY are going to THE SALVATION ARMY. My Valentine's gift to the hurting.

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One lone telepath finds himself a helpless spectator as the race of Man is subjugated into mindless drones by the very blood within their bodies.When the war is over, and he finds himself totally alone ... How can he go on and why?

CALL ME TOMBS

The last Lakota Heyoka faces voodoo and ultimate evil in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania with his Hellhound, Puppy

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BLOG TOUR FOR ALEX J, CAVANAUGH'S NEWEST NOVEL

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The Norse Gods Are Watching You!

BRAINE at TALK SUPE

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NERDY IS THE NEW SEXY!

BECOME A JEDI KNIGHT FOR TEENS

THE SECRET OF SPRUCE KNOLL

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AMAZON KEEPS SELLING OUT!

Written by the author who could very well turn out to be the new William Faulkner, Elliot Grace